This dark time of the year, many religious traditions have candle lighting as part of their services. Even though I can’t see the flame, this tradition of bringing light and warmth to people makes a lot of sense to me. I’d like to light a few virtual candles here for some recently deceased famous and not so famous people.

I light a candle for Nancy Mairs. She’s one of my favorite authors with a disability. When you read her Waist High in the World or any of her other books, you meet a bright, articulate and sensitive woman who thinks and feels deeply about her world and her God. An obituary is at: www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/books/nancy-mairs-dead-author.html.

I’ll light another candle for another author, Luis Montalvan. For those of you who read Until Tuesday by Luis Montalvan about a veteran and his Golden Retriever PTSD service dog. I’m sorry to let you know, Luis died last weekend. His descriptions of PTSD helped me understand it better than anything I’d read in the psych literature. Apparently Tuesday is living with a loving family in the Northeast. More info at the training school www.ecad1.org/Luis.

I’ll light another candle for another Nancy. I became aware of her from visiting her assisted living facility where she and her hearing ear service dog lived. She died not as a famous person, but as someone who brought out a lot of caring from staff and others at the facility. Since few of us know sign and she had trouble reading lips, communication was somewhat limited. But her pride in her pooch shone through to the point of dressing it up with coats, etc. Staff and residents banded together to walk the dog and take care of its needs when she was hospitalized.

I’ll let a young man from a Sunday school class I talked to recently light the last candle. At the beginning of the lesson, somebody else rushed to light the candle because the young man was on crutches from a fall that week. He protested that he could still do it, but others “helped” him by doing it for him. It was a great lead-in for my talk about how to help others without sliming them. I’m assured that after my talk, he will get his candle-lighting job back next week and will get to ask for whatever help he wants (if any) in order to be able to accomplish his chore.

As Eleanor Roosevelt and others have said, it’s better to light a single candle than curse the darkness. Let’s hear it for candle lighters.